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Comment by gcanyon | Hacker News Reader

It's strange to think how modern concepts are only modern because no one thought of them back then. This feels (to me) like the germ theory being transferred back to the ancient greeks.

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Right? Backprop was published in 1986, a year before HyperCard shipped. Attention is newer, but a small model like this was buildable.

Lisp is from 1960's and with s9 you can do even calculus with ease, in an interpreter small enough to fit in two floppies.

On the Greeks, Archimede almost did 'Calculus 0.9'.

People did think of many of these core concepts decades ago, but they did not have the resources to put them into practice.

I think it's incredible to see the potential that is still locked up in old hardware. For example the 8088 MPH demo. Amazing what he was able to do with an 8088 and CGA. All this time the hardware had that potential, but it took decades to figure out how to unlock it, long after the hardware was considered obsolete. Imagine the sort of things that might be done later down the road with hardware of 0-20 years ago if somebody really dug into it to that level.

Retro console homebrew and demoscene are all about this. There's a lot of fun stuff going on in N64 homebrew right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNEo0aQkGnU

On the N64, an equirectangular viewer a la QT3D or the current street view is not precisely a wonder.. m68k's could do that at a similar resolution. It's simple 3D in the end.

For the rest, yes, it's really astounding until you push these polygons while moving around in a game loop...

That 8088 MPH demo is a tour de force. Which tells you that the millions of Apple laptops being bricked right now instead of being recycled could have some amazing use if it were possible to wipe them clean and reuse. Sigh.

Well, we've set it up so the survival of employees and their families is tied to old products being bricked.

8088 MPH: this one, right?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y

8088 MPH demo is revolutionary. I have a plan to try and backport the developments from that demo, plus other optimizations learned in the last 40 years, back into the original 8088 Elite PC version. I had Gemini Pro write a PoC using 8088 assembler to create a CGA flat-poly renderer for the ships, which worked great. Next step is to use Claude to disassemble the original Elite binary so I can figure out where the rendering code lives and try to start patching it.

They created a better Pacman for Atari 2600, better Outruns for Amiga's and whatnot.

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